A Change To PDF Printing Settings

The Way Things Were

For several years, our websites included a feature that allowed you to activate privacy features on PDFs that would automatically turn off your customers’ ability to print PDFs sent to them through your website.

This way, printers could be confident that unscrupulous customers couldn’t take a PDF proof they receive and either print it themselves or bring it to another printshop to have it printed.

This was a helpful feature in its time, but unfortunately appears to have run its course.

It’s come to our attention that there is a conflict between newer versions of Adobe Acrobat and this site feature. The software we are currently using to do this can be upgraded, but at a cost that is prohibitive for our purposes.

And frankly, it’s redundant, because Adobe Acrobat Professional has provided the ability to set printing restrictions for several years now.

Going Forward

Therefore, we are discontinuing this feature imminently. We have conducted an internal study and found this affects approximately 60 printshops, and we’ll be contacting those printshops over the following week.

With this change, you will need to manually assign permissions for the files you send out. Adobe Acrobat Professional has the built-in ability to not only restrict printing, but a wide range of other security options as well. To access those, go to File, Properties…, and Security.

If you’re building Pageflex templates for uDesignIT, there are also settings in there that handle PDF security options. Those are accessed in the job settings, in the PDF Properties section, under the Security tab.

If we’re building Pageflex documents for you, please let us know when want security restrictions enabled.

Better In The Long-Run

It feels very strange to move from an automated process to a manual one. But we hope you’ll agree that because of the wider range of options that are available and the greater reliability across all active versions of Adobe Acrobat, this is a change for the better.